Archive for the ‘News’ Category

The OERC will be attending the Library Assessment Conference (LAC) at University of Washington this week, where we will be learning about new trends in library assessment, evaluation, and improvement. Stayed tuned to our blog and we will pass along what we learn. The LAC is sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries.

In the meantime, I want to leave you with a fun data visualization site to explore while we’re gone. David McCandless creates wonderful infographics for his site “Information is Beautiful.” Many are health-related. All are gorgeous. You can find the list of his data visualizations here.

Planning focus groups? You might want to check out the Libraries Transforming Communities Community Conversation Workbook by the American Library Association (ALA).

This workbook is a resource developed for the ALA’s Libraries Transforming Communities (LTC) initiative, which provides librarians with training and resources to enhance their roles as community leaders and change-agents. The initiative’s goal is to help librarians promote the visibility and value of their libraries within their communities. Public discussions are promoted as key community engagement strategies.

To that end, ALA has developed the Libraries Transforming Communities Community Conversation Workbook. This workbook provides invaluable guidance to anyone who wants to conduct discussion groups for community assessment purposes. It provides practical advice on every aspect of convening group discussions, including tips on participant recruitment, a list of discussion questions, facilitator guidelines, note-taking tools, and templates for organizing key findings.

Demonstrating value is of considerable interest to many libraries and organizations these days. Such organizations may be interested in exploring other articles and resources related to the LTC initiative. You can find more information about the initiative at the LTC web page. You can also see how libraries are implementing LTC activities at the initiative’s digital portal:

With an increase of technology tools available for data reporting and visualization (be sure to check out some of our Outreach Evaluation Resource Center Reporting and Visualizing tools at http://guides.nnlm.gov/oerc/tools) sometimes it’s challenging to know how to best use them to clearly communicate the intended meaning of the data. The concept of visualization literacy and a broader theme of visual literacy are often not included as part of the instructions guiding people in the steps to create their own visualization design.

If you do evaluation, you likely use Excel. So I recommend bookmarking this web page of short videos with excellent instructions and practical tips for analyzing data with Excel. Ann Emery produced these videos, most of which are 2-5 minutes long. Some cover the basics, such as how to calculate descriptive statistics. If you find pivot tables difficult to grasp, there’s a short video describing the different components. For the experienced user, there are videos about more advanced topics such as how to automate dashboards using Excel and Word.

Emery is an evaluator and data analyst with Innovation Network in Washington, DC. She has a special interest in data visualization and covers that and other topics in her blog, also available at her website.

If so you will quickly encounter hashtags, which are user-controlled categories prefaced with a pound sign. Hashtags were once limited to Twitter but are now used on most social media sites including Facebook and Google+. Conversational, concise, and consistent use of up to two hashtags per social media message can result in double the amount of user engagement compared to messages without them. For more statistics specific to Twitter and user engagement, Buffer’s coverage at http://blog.bufferapp.com/10-new-twitter-stats-twitter-statistics-to-help-you-reach-your-followers is an excellent overview.

What are some of the ways to show that hashtags increase user engagement with your organization’s message? Look for performance indicators of reposts (the use of ‘Share’ on Facebook or retweets on Twitter), replies (comments under the message from Facebook followers, replies to the tweet from Twitter users), the number of clicks to any links included in your message (ideally to your organization’s website and resources), and hashtag usage frequency.

HealthyPeople.gov provides science-based 10 year national objectives to help improve the health of all Americans. These objectives are focused on encouraging collaborations across communities, empowering people to make individual health choices, and measuring the impact of prevention activities. Currently we are in the time frame referred to as Healthy People 2020 with goals and objectives to achieve by the year 2020 listed at their website http://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/about

Monthly Leading Health Indicators (LHI) infographics help visually communicate Healthy People 2020 data, such as the one above about children’s exposure to secondhand smoke based on health insurance status, and are freely available for download and use by the public at http://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/LHI/infographicGallery.aspx. The infographics are arranged in chronological order, most recent month available at the top, with the LHI area included so you can quickly identify and click those health topics of interest to you and your programs. They are also a great source of data, both in raw downloads and these visualizations, for presentations and publications for your health information outreach programs that are related to the LHI areas. Be sure to sign up for their monthly newsletter at the infographic site so you won’t miss the latest one each month!

Librarians’ expert searching skills provide some great opportunities for collaboration with researchers. Biomed Central’s new open access Systematic Reviews journal is about a specialized type of expert searching that librarians can provide for their communities. More than a source of protocols and a record of others’ work, this journal has great potential for those of us in academia who want to publish articles to share information with our colleagues about what we have done.

Systematic Reviews encompasses all aspects of the design, conduct and reporting of systematic reviews. The journal aims to publish high quality systematic review products including systematic review protocols, systematic reviews related to a very broad definition of health, rapid reviews, updates of already completed systematic reviews, and methods research related to the science of systematic reviews, such as decision modeling. The journal also aims to ensure that the results of all well-conducted systematic reviews are published, regardless of their outcome.

It is a long-term goal of the journal to ensure all systematic reviews are prospectively registered in an appropriate database, such as PROSPERO, as these resources for registration become available and are endorsed by the scientific community.

Article types include:

Research Articles

Commentaries

Letters

Methodologies

Protocols

Review Updates

The editors-in-chief comprise an international group hailing from the University of Ottawa; the RAND corporation and UCLA; and the University of York.

Take a look at this journal! It could be a source of inspiration for any librarian whose emphasis is on expert searching.

Attention iPad and iPhone users: SurveyMonkey recently launched a mobile app so you can create, send, and monitor your surveys from your phone or tablet. The app is free, although you need a SurveyMonkey account to use it.

With the SurveyMonkey app, you no longer have to rely on your computer to design and manage a survey. The app also allows you to conveniently view your data from any location with Internet access. I think the most notable benefit is that the analytic reports are optimized for mobile devices and are easy to read on small screens.

I have been asked how this app compares to QuickTapSurvey (see my previous blog entry). In my opinion, the app does not make SurveyMonkey comparable to QuickTapSurvey, which is designed specifically to collect onsite visitor feedback in informal settings such as exhibits and museums. SurveyMonkey, by comparison, is designed to collect data through email, web sites, or social media. Both apps work best in their respective settings. I think you could adapt SurveyMonkey to collect data at face-to-face events (if there is onsite Internet access), but it probably won’t work as smoothly as QuickTapSurvey.

Did you know that the American Medical Association has a specific recommendation for its authors about questionnaire response rate? Here it is, from the JAMA Instructions for Authors:

Survey Research
Manuscripts reporting survey data, such as studies involving patients, clinicians, the public, or others, should report data collected as recently as possible, ideally within the past 2 years. Survey studies should have sufficient response rates (generally at least 60%) and appropriate characterization of nonresponders to ensure that nonresponse bias does not threaten the validity of the findings. For most surveys, such as those conducted by telephone, personal interviews (eg, drawn from a sample of households), mail, e-mail, or via the web, authors are encouraged to report the survey outcome rates using standard definitions and metrics, such as those proposed by the American Association for Public Opinion Research.

Meanwhile, response rates to questionnaires have been declining over the past 20 years, as reported by the Pew Research Center in “The Problem of Declining Response Rates.” Why should we care about the AMA’s recommendation regarding questionnaire response rates? Many of us will send questionnaires to health care professionals who, like physicians, are very busy and might not pay attention to our efforts to learn about them. Even JAMA authors such as Johnson and Wislar have pointed out that “60% is only a “rule of thumb” that masks a more complex issue.” (Johnson TP; Wislar JS. “Response Rates and Nonresponse Errors in Surveys.” JAMA, May 2, 2012—Vol 307, No. 17, p.1805) These authors recommend that we evaluate nonresponse bias in order to characterize differences between those who respond and those who don’t. These standard techniques include:

Conduct a follow-up survey with nonrespondents

Use data about your sampling frame and study population to compare respondents to nonrespondents

Compare the sample with other data sources

Compare early and late respondents

Johnson and Wislar’s article is not open access, unfortunately, but you can find more suggestions about increasing response rates to your questionnaires in two recent AEA365 blog posts that are open access:

The National Network of Libraries of Medicine Outreach Evaluation Resource Center (OERC) offers a range of webinars and workshops upon request by network members and coordinators from the various regions. Take a look at the list and see if one of the options appeals to you. To request a workshop or webinar, contact Susan Barnes.

The workshops were designed as face-to-face learning opportunities but we can tailor them to meet distance learning needs by distilling them to briefer webinars or offering them in series of 1-hour webinars.

Don’t see what you’re looking for on this list? Then please contact Susan and let her know!